After some more poking and proding, I was able to produce an NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI Intel Edition reference motherboard to test the Conroe on -- thus far all tests have been done on Intel chipset motherboards.

With this board, I should be able to get some of the first public SLI performance numbers in a real world game scenario, just like we use in our video card and GPU reviews, to see if Conroe can offer real world benefits to gaming.

As I already mentioned, while I have the E6700 CPU in my hands that will be the top of the line Core 2 Duo processor released next month, the Core 2 Extreme Edition X6800 will run one multiplier faster at 2.93 GHz compared to the 2.67 GHz of the E6700. While this ES processor would not allow me to move the multipliers UP to test at X6800 speeds, I could move the multipliers DOWN in order to test E6600, E6400 and E6300 CPU speeds set respectively at 2.40 GHz, 2.13 GHz and 1.86 GHz.

Do note that in his benchmarks he lists E6300/E6400 but remember that these lower clocked CPUs also have 2Mb L2 cache instead of 4Mb L2 like the E6600 and E6700. So the performance numbers for these lower clocks unit is not 100% exact.

remote article has been updated, fired off an email to the author, he's quick

Quote:

(Note: currently, the information I have seen says the E6400 and E6300 will only have 2MB of L2 cache, not the 4MB that the E6600 and E6700 have; this may affect performance results on those actual processors when they launch).